It richly chronicles one man's rise to wealth, power, and prominence - and the haunting sense of failure at his heart.

    But in Guy's case, the legend is one of betrayal and infamy. For the scandal of his embezzlement brought down the delicately balanced structure of the Stock Exchange. The long-honored system of self-government by mutual trust among gentlemen came to an end with the default of one of its brightest stars.The story of Guy's fall is told by the three persons most intimately concerned: Guy himself, Rex Geer, his closest friend, and Angelica, his wife. We see him first through his own eyes — embittered, oddly proud of his peculiar distinction, and entirely unrepentant — the golden boy, the Wall Street manipulator, and finally the old man determined to justify himself to the grandchildren he will never see.Rex and Angelica in turn pick up the same threads of the story, but the threads change color subtly as they pass through different hands. In the end, the reader must decide for himself which is the real Guy Prime.Louis Auchincloss brings to the financial world the same authority and understanding he brought to the worlds of the law (Powers of Attorney), the private school (The Rector of Justin), and the old families of New York (Portrait in Brownstone). Virgilia Peterson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The Rector of Justin "not only a passionately interesting, but a spiritually important study of the American character of, and for our time." Her words hold true for The Embezzler.

    The author's characters are unforgettable, while their predicaments are funny, improbably logical, and almost affecting as Africa itself.

    But the beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s. The plot turns on tragic events—they might be accidents or they might be acts of will—involving a cast of rural eccentrics that includes a lonely amputee veteran, a religious hysteric (thought by some to be the devil himself) and an itinerant "Goat Lady." Questions of guilt, innocence, and even murder are eclipsed by deeds of compassion, humility, and redemption, and ultimately by Henry Soames' quiet discovery of grace.Novelist William H. Gass, a friend and colleague of the author, has written an introduction that shines new light on the work and career of the much praised but often misunderstood John Gardner.

    Resourcefully, doggedly, Jacky nurtures his spirit of independence, his capacity to love, and his faith in a nation's dream in a journey that takes him from Wichita to Corpus Christi and from poverty to possibility.

    Millhauser is mine.”—David Rollow, Boston Sunday GlobeFrom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author: the essential stories across three decades that showcase his indomitable imagination.Steven Millhauser’s fiction has consistently, and to dazzling effect, dissolved the boundaries between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, the past and the future, darkness and light, love and lust. The stories gathered here unfurl in settings as disparate as nineteenth-century Vienna, a contemporary Connecticut town, the corridors of a monstrous museum, and Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and they are inhabited by a wide-ranging cast of characters, including a knife thrower and teenage boys, ghosts and a cartoon cat and mouse. But all of the stories are united in their unfailing power to surprise and enchant. From the earliest to the stunning, previously unpublished novella-length title story—in which a man who is dead, but not quite gone, reaches out to two lonely women—Millhauser in this magnificent collection carves out ever more deeply his wondrous place in the American literary canon.

    Set in the Midwest, where Florida represents a faraway paradise, this novel tells the story of Alice Fivey. Fatherless since she was seven, Alice is left in the care of her relatives at the age of ten, when her mother, whose "toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida," is institutionalized. Alice is moved from place to place, remaining still while others try to mold her into someone different from her mother. She consoles herself with books and becomes a storyteller herself as she moves into adulthood, ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions and closer to the meaning of her own experience. Told in brief scenes of spare beauty, Florida is a graceful and gripping tale of family, forgiveness, and creation of the self.

    More freedom than she has ever imagined awaits her at Columbia University in the 1960s. There, Felicitas falls in love with the worst man for her -- with shattering results. Now she must turn again to the company of the women who love her as she struggles to embrace the future without betraying the past.

    Charles Baxter is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of numerous works, including The Feast of Love.

    The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.

    In prose of astonishing clarity and intensity, Agee captured the portrait of an appealing and very real boy - serious, pitiable, funny - at the moment of his initiation into a feared yet fascinating world.

    The past: the suicides of his father, wife and daughter, the murder of his son-in-law, a brutal rape, and subsequent mutiny at sea. The present: caring for his granddaughter on a "northern" island where he works as an artificial inseminator of cows, and attempts to reclaim the innocence with which he faced the tragedies of his earlier life. Combining unflinching descriptions of suffering with his sense of beauty, Hawkes is a master of nimble and sensuous prose who makes the awful and mundane fantastic, and occasionally makes the fantastic surreal.

    The Washington Post described this novel as "a fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with a family curse. The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium."

    Gates [has a] pitch-perfect ear for contemporary speech... and... [a] keen, journalistic eye."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesIn this comic, fiercely compassionate novel, David Gates, whose first novel Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, sends his protagonist on a visceral journey to the dark side of suburban masculinity, explores the claims youth makes on middle age, and the tenacious --at times perverse--power of love to assert itself.When Doug Willis has a mid-life crisis, he doesn't join a gym or have an affair. Instead he gets himself arrested while camping with his wife and kids, takes a two month leave of absence from his PR job, and retreats to his farmhouse in rural Preston Falls--where he plugs in his guitar and tries to shut out his life.While his wife, Jean, struggles to pay the bills and raise their sullen, skeptical kids, Willis's plans for hiatus crumble into Dewars-and-cocaine fueled disarray. A shattered window, an unguarded gun, and a shady small town attorney force a crisis--and Willis can't go home again. With its biting humor and harsh realism, Preston Falls confirms David Gates as a talent in the tradition of Russell Banks and Richard Ford: a master of dark truths and private longings.

    Frank Rich in "The New York Times" wrote about "Prelude," "It is rare to find a play so suffused with sorrow that sends one home so high." Also included are "Missing Persons," "a truly intelligent play, one that is literary and heartfelt, beautifully written...a well-crafted, moving story, a dramatic rarity in these or any times "("New York Post"), and "Three Postcards," an offbeat and uniquely imaginative free form musical play. Craig Lucas is also the author of "Reckless and Blue Window" and "What I Mean Was." He lives in Putnam Valley, New York.